Kathy leaves the newspaper business to marry homicide detective Bill but is frustrated by his lack of ambition and the banality of life in the suburbs. Her drive to advance Bill's career soon takes her down a dangerous path.

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Storyline

Kathy is a smart and tough 1950's advice columnist at a San Francisco newspaper, with her name plastered on billboards all over the city. One day, Bill Doyle, a Los Angeles detective, walks into her office - it is instant attraction. After marrying Bill, Kathy gives up her career and becomes a homemaker. However, she is not your typical 1950's homemaker. After hosting several cocktail parties in their San Fernando Valley home, she realizes that Bill is content with his position, and shows no ambition in furthering himself. Kathy will not sit idly by while everyone around her is "moving up in the world". She personally takes upon herself the task of pushing Bill's career along, even if it comes down to murder. Written by
Kelly

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Did You Know?

Goofs

When Kathy calls Alice from the phone booth and hears she is leaving for Honolulu, the reflection of the cameraman is seen all through the scene on the back window of the booth (above left Kathy's head), and it moves as the camera pulls back. See more »

Quotes

Alice Pope:
You said, "Bill, you better go right out and get your lunch because I've just driven up Mrs Pole's telephone Pope".
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Frequently Asked Questions

User Reviews

Don't be put off by the negative commentary on this film (which surprises me almost as much as the film's unflinching social critique). Stanwyck gives a strong performance in an unusual late-cycle noir; unusual in that it opens in conventional noir style, wraps up the first noir plot in less than ten minutes, then proceeds into insightful and incisive melodrama. Sharper socially than even Fritz Lang's late noirs, "Crime of Passion" reminds us of the "nostalgia" for the "happy family values" of the 1950's for the wishful (?) thinking that it is. Stanwyck's slow descent into middle-class torpor and madness (she's a sharp, witty, intelligent woman who saddles herself with a maddeningly boring and conventional cop husband, played nicely against type by Sterling Hayden) lays bare the social nightmare presented to women desiring anything but the conventional patriarchal lifestyle (at one point, the LA police captain tells Stanwyck that she should be at home making her husband supper-- a line which haunts both Stanwyck and the film).

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